On the road through Alabama, Dig reflects on the New York left behind:
He remembered lying in a cellar in Bushwick, in Brooklyn, down where the aroma of rotten planks and crossbeams bred a paradoxical atmosphere of fertility. He had a wrench in his hand and pliers in his belt. A wad of intersecting pipe hovered nine inches above his face.
He’d been down there an hour, fiddling around with everything that budged. Every once in a while the voice of someone in the building – most often a child – rose to a level sufficient to penetrate the floorboards above him. Otherwise, the place bore a stillness so inclusive that even the pipes above him were silent, bereft both of trickle and hum.
He’d been in Rio two weeks earlier.
There’d been a gunfight in a playground, just six meager blocks from the home of the MeetUp family that hosted him.
A nanny died in the cross-fire, blown down at the feet of an unsuspecting child.
He’d read about it in one of the Anglophone papers hoisted from the sidewalk, the words coming at him bloodless, an impotent chant, the conjured-up sorrow of a substance far inferior to the devastation he felt the day he came back to New York.
Woman robbed at knife-point in Bed-Stuy.
Page 6 of the Village Voice.
Not even injured. Just robbed.
And knowing no cause for his heightened revulsion other than the fact that it was Brooklyn this time. New York this time. Just another texture to the bloodbath of Home.
And there in the cellar of the nameless complex, with Bed-Stuy and the place of the mugging twelve blocks east, and closer still the warehouses and alleys of Bushwick, surrounding the cellar, and yet muted by the cellar, and shut out by the cellar, he found himself spontaneously struck by the feeling that he could stay there forever. Put down the wrench and close his eyes and enter a silence so deep that even the shouting of the child wouldn’t rouse him.
Instead he finished the job, hopped the train to Manhattan, and walked through Central Park. The crickets were already starting to sing, and the Latinos walked by in their sweat-stained A-shirts and their hacked-off shorts, followed by the women from 73rd St with their strollers and their heat-marred makeup, and the sweat of the city clung to the pavement, and the sound of the traffic and the metropolitan chaos purred through the trees, four octaves south of the crickets, and as always he could smell the baseball field long before he saw it – the kicked-up dust and the mass of leather gloves and palmed out bats – and he sat on the bleachers and watched them play, and every crack of the bat seemed to break open the air and leave in its wake a space to be filled, and the coach yelled and echoed in yelling, and within an hour of watching the fireflies had started to appear, and the contrast in heat between cellar and park had stoned him silly and played with his pores, and he remembered from afar, the park and the baseball, and he missed New York for the first time since leaving.
He remembered lying in a cellar in Bushwick, in Brooklyn, down where the aroma of rotten planks and crossbeams bred a paradoxical atmosphere of fertility. He had a wrench in his hand and pliers in his belt. A wad of intersecting pipe hovered nine inches above his face.
He’d been down there an hour, fiddling around with everything that budged. Every once in a while the voice of someone in the building – most often a child – rose to a level sufficient to penetrate the floorboards above him. Otherwise, the place bore a stillness so inclusive that even the pipes above him were silent, bereft both of trickle and hum.
He’d been in Rio two weeks earlier.
There’d been a gunfight in a playground, just six meager blocks from the home of the MeetUp family that hosted him.
A nanny died in the cross-fire, blown down at the feet of an unsuspecting child.
He’d read about it in one of the Anglophone papers hoisted from the sidewalk, the words coming at him bloodless, an impotent chant, the conjured-up sorrow of a substance far inferior to the devastation he felt the day he came back to New York.
Woman robbed at knife-point in Bed-Stuy.
Page 6 of the Village Voice.
Not even injured. Just robbed.
And knowing no cause for his heightened revulsion other than the fact that it was Brooklyn this time. New York this time. Just another texture to the bloodbath of Home.
And there in the cellar of the nameless complex, with Bed-Stuy and the place of the mugging twelve blocks east, and closer still the warehouses and alleys of Bushwick, surrounding the cellar, and yet muted by the cellar, and shut out by the cellar, he found himself spontaneously struck by the feeling that he could stay there forever. Put down the wrench and close his eyes and enter a silence so deep that even the shouting of the child wouldn’t rouse him.
Instead he finished the job, hopped the train to Manhattan, and walked through Central Park. The crickets were already starting to sing, and the Latinos walked by in their sweat-stained A-shirts and their hacked-off shorts, followed by the women from 73rd St with their strollers and their heat-marred makeup, and the sweat of the city clung to the pavement, and the sound of the traffic and the metropolitan chaos purred through the trees, four octaves south of the crickets, and as always he could smell the baseball field long before he saw it – the kicked-up dust and the mass of leather gloves and palmed out bats – and he sat on the bleachers and watched them play, and every crack of the bat seemed to break open the air and leave in its wake a space to be filled, and the coach yelled and echoed in yelling, and within an hour of watching the fireflies had started to appear, and the contrast in heat between cellar and park had stoned him silly and played with his pores, and he remembered from afar, the park and the baseball, and he missed New York for the first time since leaving.
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